About Me

Friday, March 04, 2016

Till everyone is blind

Someone I love
dearly recently posted a link to an online article, praising it as
profound wisdom. When another whom I love also admired the article, I
clicked through and read for myself. Sadly, what I found was not
wisdom. I found arguments that sounded reasonable, but at the heart
of which lay deadly poison. I am so concerned for those whom I love,
and for the author of the article (who is but expressing a popular
sentiment), that I feel compelled to respond. But I didn't want to do
it in bits and pieces in comment boxes, so I'm writing a post of my
own.

You
can read the column here.
The author, ever so gently, excuses the sin of unforgiveness in the
name of speaking for justice. She uses the example of Irish pub songs
to springboard to the racial tensions in America. The reason this is
so wrong is that unforgiveness is a deeper, more pernicious sin than
racial injustice or cultural oppression. Unforgiveness can never be
excused no matter how noble the rationale, and those who indulge it
will ultimately lose all other goods, including justice, as
bitterness and hatred consume their minds and souls.

We
need to remember that justice is a minimum standard for treatment of
others. Ideally, we'll be charitable to each other, but failing that
we can be generous, and if we can't manage that perhaps we can be
kind, but at the very least we should be just. Of course, it's also
true that justice is foundational – without justice, expressions of
kindness or generosity ring hollow, empty expressions of sentiment.
But if justice does not lead to the higher goods, it remains stunted,
a truncated foundation for human relations. Just as foundations were
meant to be built upon, not moved into, so justice points to the
greatest good, which is charity.

Forgiveness
is essential to charity. I cannot be charitable toward someone
against whom I am holding a grudge. Neither is forgiveness optional,
as if it were some lofty goal that only saints can achieve. As Jesus
makes clear in the Parable of the Unmerciful Servant (Matt
18), our not forgiving others can get our own forgiveness
rescinded. Forgiving as we are forgiven lies at the heart of the
central prayer of Christianity. As Peter Kreeft observes, if we
refuse to forgive, we speak damnation on our own heads every time we
pray. Forgiveness does not negate wrongs (the Unmerciful Servant was
truly owed, and justly deserved repayment), and neither does it
negate the requirements of justice. But neither does it become
optional when a certain victim count has been exceeded. Unforgiveness
in the name of an oppressed nation or group or race is merely
whitewash, because ultimately all these things are abstractions. Only
individuals are moral agents, and individuals are commanded to
forgive.

The
cruel irony is that while the sin of unforgiveness is excused in the
name of promoting justice in some arena, be it political or economic
or whatever, bondage to sin is the deepest bondage of all. Ultimately
it doesn't matter how “free” you are economically, or how much
“justice” you've obtained in the political arena: if you're in
thrall to sin, you're a slave. In her column, Ms. Weiss refers to
“songs about killing the English” as “a trope, not an emotional
reality”, and excuses singing them because “we root for the
underdog.” She acknowledges that “hating people is wrong”, but
then neuters her own statement by saying that “telling oppressed
people to 'stop that hating' doesn't work too well.” Odd how Jesus
stood in the midst of a people who'd been oppressed for centuries and
told them to do precisely that. Those who did were freed even though
the political and economic yoke of Rome remained. Those who refused
to remained enslaved in every sense.

The
truth is that the “tropes” which Ms. Weiss considers harmless
because they are “not an emotional reality” are not harmless at
all, but poisonous seeds that have sprouted and borne bitter fruit in
Ireland through the generations. Perhaps the parish priests of
Ireland tended to excise Matthew 18 from the Mass readings when it
came around, or maybe they taught that it didn't apply to the
English, or that it was applicable to individuals but not nations. I
don't know, but I do know that the Church in Ireland, as well as the
Irish people, are now paying a bitter price because the Church there
chose to be a cultural institution interested in preserving its power
rather than the impoverished Bride proclaiming her Divine Spouse's
message of charity – including that difficult part about forgiving.
“Tropes” that keep alive unforgiveness are anything but innocent.
In Balkan Ghosts, Robert
Kaplan recounts how the Serbs commemorated their crushing defeat at
the hands of the Turks at Kossovo Polje in 1389:

On
June 28, 1988, the year-long
countdown to the sixth centenary of Lazar's martyrdom at Kossovo
Polje began when his coffin began a tour of every town and
village in Serbia...The coffin
drew huge, black-clad crowds of mourners at every stop... “Every
[Serbian] peasant soldier knows what he is fighting for,” noted
John Reed, at the front in World War I. “When he was a baby, his
mother greeted him with, 'Hail, little avenger of Kossovo!'”
(Kaplan, Balkan
Ghosts, p. 38, emphasis added)

Six
hundred years.

In
light of these “tropes”, this “rooting for the underdog”
(which Serbians would certainly consider “rooted in a longing for
justice”), does anyone think it coincidence that Slobadan Milosevic
was able to appeal to this bitterness lying at the core of the
Serbian soul? Does it surprise anyone that these same Serbs are now
resisting the flow of refugees across their country – refugees who
are victims themselves, and who have no relation to those who
oppressed the Serbs – simply because the refugees are Muslim?

Unforgiveness
is never innocent. Regardless of the
argument used to rationalize
it, it always bears poisonous fruit. Dr. Martin Luther King
recognized it, which was why he always preached forgiveness alongside
justice. Gandhi recognized this, and though the Muslims and Hindus
had a record of mutual oppression that went back centuries, and both
had suffered under the British occupation, he stood in their midst
and dared proclaim, “stop that hating!” (How
many heeded his call can be seen in the ongoing violence between
Hindus and Muslims.)
Unforgiveness never liberates. To hear a powerful testimony to just
how innocent those tropes sung in Irish pubs are, listen to Irish
poet Tommy Sands' song There
Were Roses.

“And
another eye for another eye, till everyone is blind.”

That's
where unforgiveness leads. Period. Those who condemn forgiveness as
weakness, who refuse to leave offense behind, who fan the flames of
indignation in their breasts in the name of justice, are but chaining
themselves more tightly to a crueler master. There is no freedom down
that road, only more slavery.

Stop
reciting the tropes. Stop that hating. Forgive. It's the only path to
freedom – for an individual, a family, a clan, a race, a nation.
For Irish and English, black and white, Serb and Turk, Hindu and
Muslim – it doesn't matter who. Forgiveness is the only way to
freedom. All other paths lead to slavery.